From an award-winning black journalist, a tough-minded look at the
treatment of ethnic minorities both in newsrooms and in the
reporting that comes out of them, within the changing media
landscape.
From the Rodney King riots to the racial inequities of the new
digital media, Amy Alexander has chronicled the biggest race and
class stories of the modern era in American journalism. Beginning
in the bare-knuckled newsrooms of 1980s San Francisco, her career
spans a period of industry-wide economic collapse and tremendous
national demographic changes.
Despite reporting in some of the country's most diverse cities,
including San Francisco, Boston, and Miami, Alexander consistently
encountered a stubbornly white, male press corps and a surprising
lack of news concerning the ethnic communities in these
multicultural metropolises. Driven to shed light on the race and
class struggles taking place in the United States, Alexander
embarked on a rollercoaster career marked by cultural conflicts
within newsrooms. Along the way, her identity as a black woman
journalist changed dramatically, an evolution that coincided with
sweeping changes in the media industry and the advent of the
Internet.
Armed with census data and news-industry demographic research,
Alexander explains how the so-called New Media is reenacting Old
Media's biases. She argues that the idea of newsroom diversity--at
best an afterthought in good economic times--has all but fallen off
the table as the industry fights for its economic life, a dynamic
that will ultimately speed the demise of venerable news outlets.
Moreover, for the shrinking number of journalists of color who
currently work at big news organizations, the lingering ethos of
having to be "twice as good" as their white counterparts continues;
it is a reality that threatens to stifle another generation of
practitioners from "non-traditional" backgrounds.
In this hard-hitting account, Alexander evaluates her own career
in the context of the continually evolving story of America's
growing ethnic populations and the homogenous newsrooms producing
our nation's too often monochromatic coverage. This veteran
journalist examines the major news stories that were entrenched in
the great race debate of the past three decades, stories like those
of Elian Gonzalez, Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Tavis Smiley, the
tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and the election of Barack Obama.
"Uncovering Race" offers sharp analysis of how race, gender, and
class come to bear on newsrooms, and takes aim at mainstream
media's failure to successfully cover a browner, younger nation--a
failure that Alexander argues is speeding news organizations'
demise faster than the Internet.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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